use Perl

• DL$MT%DF@#(hhh (Score:1)

  by joejoe (8543)

  Wow, you really taught that guy I've never heard of a lesson!
  
  You know, I keep getting your articles through planet parrot in my RSS reader, and waaay too many of them are you doing this kind of petty bitching about what "some guy" said. I wouldn't care what you say either, but these things are being pumped out through planet parrot (and planet perl), which annoys me greatly.
  
  For what it's worth:
  for =$*IN -> $guess { ... }
  is a trainwreck. It's the =$* that gets me. I like the ->. I'm OK with the non
  • Re: (Score:1)

    by chromatic (983)

    For what it's worth...

    I can imagine you'd find it frustrating if people so casually dismissed your work with superficial complaints, especially if their complaints demonstrate little attempt to understand what you're trying to do. Maybe I'm extra sensitive this month from dealing with an underdocumented SOA project with heaps of code generation, WSDL, and EJBs.

    Unary prefix = always iterates over an iterator. The * twigil always indicates a global variable. $*IN represents standard input. Now that
    • Re: (Score:1)

      by joejoe (8543)

      I can certainly decipher that bit of code with the help of the docs/web (and did), but I really don't want to decipher it everytime I revisit that line. It's not about being a "novice": I expect to have to learn the language, but I'm not going to be able to "learn" punctuation. Maybe that's a limit for me only... I don't know. I know perl 5 pretty well, but I still can't reliably remember whether it's ~= or =~ for regular expressions, and $_ and the $ vars are the only perlvars I have memorized (though $/
      • Re:DL$MT%DF@#(hhh (Score:1)

        by chromatic (983) on 2008.04.05 0:01 (#61992) Homepage Journal

        Perl 6 relies on sigils and operators, but our hope is that by gathering and grouping variables such as $*IN and %*ENV (I bet you can guess what that one is) and turning other Perl 5 magic globals into object properties, the conceptual weight of the system is much less. Hopefully at least they'll be easier to look up this way.

        Unfortunately, some people have trouble reading symbols. I have trouble reading code without judicious vertical whitespace to separate paragraphs, so Python can be a chore. (Is this empty line the end of an block or just a paragraph within the block?)

        Thanks for the advice, though. I'll try more practical posts and lay off the theory and advocacy for a while.

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        Parent

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by duff (16)

          I think I can see where joejoe is coming from. Perl is often compared to the english language and his is a good example of punctuation-blindness that writers of english seem to have. Witness the use of "im" instead of "I'm" and run-on sentences and that no one knows where to use a comma or a semicolon in their sentences. Et cetera. Perl suffers this malady more because it relies more on punctuation than english does.
          
          So maybe it's the modern (mis)use of the english language that has conditioned people to
          • Re: (Score:1)

            by chromatic (983)

            I have difficulty reading mathematic formulas. The variables keep getting jumbled. If I spent more time with a few formulas, I'd eventually memorize them. Some people are better at words than symbols, and, as programmers, they might find languages with fewer symbols easier to read. That might be the case for joejoe.

            Of course, English punctuation is mostly hints anyway. Just like you can represent Koine Greek without aspiration notation, you can represent written or spoken English without punctuation
          • Re: (Score:1)

            by joejoe (8543)

            What I obviously meant by not being able to learn punctuation is not being able to learn strings of punctuation as syntax. I am actually quite a stickler for proper use of commas and apostrophes (and I despise chat-speak abbreviations), and I don't believe my English usage is a problem in relation to my coding. Besides, one learns the rules of a natural language over years, but I typically need to learn a computer language over days or weeks (not master it, mind you, but at least read it).
            
            I have been usin